COOK'S INLET (Historic Information)

Hope, Homer, Sunrise, Kenai, Knik, Tynook, Seldovia, Kusiloff and other villages, cannery stations, trading stores and mining camps on Cook's Inlet; Coal Bay, Turnagain Arm, Knik Arm and othr branches of the Inlet; the hanging glaciers and beautiful glacial streams; the gold discoveries of Kenai Peninsula; the old Russian coal mines and deserted villages of a hundred years ago; the new coal mines of recent years; the millions of birds and fish that come to these waters in season, make this one of the most wonderful spots in Alaska, of which so much can be written, that we are obliged to pass it by in this short work. In a few years it will be as well known as some of the western states, and more resourceful than many of the eastern.

Here came nearly all the early navigators searching for the Northwest Passage, Sir John Franklin or fur; their successors establishing salmon canneries, and they, in turn, followed by promoters of oil, coal, copper and gold schemes.

The birch and poplar of the East meets the spruce from the West. The forest of the South gives way to the tundra and treeless slopes of the North. Siwash to the southward, Athabascan eastward, Esquimaux northward, and to the West Aleut.

This is the limit of the northerly coasting. From here we produce south of westerly toward Japan to the end of the Aleutian Islands, which almost reach the Asiatic coast it is another kind of country.

Here come the Coast mountains and the Rockies. At the head waters of the Copper and Susitna, and Tanana, and Kuskoquim they unite in a climax, the apex of a continent, then go off westward together until, step by step, they sink deeper and deeper into the sea, disappearing almost within sight of the shore of Japan.

Here the boats from Seattle turn back. And as we trust ourselves to the old reliable "Dora" we seem like saying farewell to human kind and plunging into silence and the unknowable. But before we enter into that journey we must finish a few subjects belonging to the first division of this book.